


Collector of Smiles and All Things Wild

by orphan_account



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: Character Development, Constructive Criticism Welcome, F/M, I like comparing Maya to the outdoors, Of course Riley has a fluffy pink rug, experimental shipping, poetic attempts at narrative (particularly in Maya's chapter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-02 04:59:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maya is a survivor. She is the one to pick herself up. Meanwhile, Farkle is fascinated by the unique little rare bird that is Maya's smile. He could never keep it in his pocket. But as she becomes more independent, he goes from being the one pursuing to the one pursued.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Maya is a survivor. She piles 'don't' and 'can't' and 'never' and 'no' around herself like sandbags, because it's the best she can do to protect what is left of her heart, beating rebelliously in a timid cage of bird bones. The sandbags (her attempts to remain aloof) hold her up. She has tried to shed her heart and beat the burning thing out of herself, but it stubbornly continues to smolder under the attentive care of a small circle of watchmen. Riley Mathews is the chief attender, and the first to put a chink in the sandbags. Riley tries to breathe hope into this little exposed patch of Maya, but she refuses to let it germinate. 

She is vulnerable enough with a smoking heart wreathed in delicate bones, a poor foundation for the love she finds herself fostering, for sweet, sun and peaches Riley, the ambitious, zany attentive puppy Farkle, and even for the smiling cowboy bumblebee Lucas. 'You could rebuild yourself,' something whispers in the white spot where her soul may be. 'There are better ways to endure.' But Maya is slightly terrified by this love, and what rebooting herself will mean. What will she sacrifice for this love if she takes that step? When is this love going to scald her newly reformed bones and flesh?

She is sixteen, watching her friends compete in a dogpile on the fluffy pink rug in Riley Mathew's bedroom, being generally ridiculous in the midst of a forgotten assignment (lethal trigonometry), when that voice in her core, the one that almost sounds like hope, nips her right on the nose. 'Failure is not in the fall,' the revelation floats behind her torrent eyes, 'it's the refusal to get up.' So she leaps, grasping this thought like a talisman, with the inkling that each time she decides to stand will make her stronger, put endurance like meat on her bird bones.

Awkwardly fumbling after one of the thoughts that has been scratching at the walls of her conscious, she asks Farkle, in hesitant, yet slightly lilting notes, if he will study with her one-on-one. She is rewarded with a smile that could light up the whole of New York until the sky no longer belonged to the atmosphere, but a gigantic theater. Farkle's theater, where hope and joy and The Sound of Music splash across the screens as often as the ancient sadness and films like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that Maya has come to know. Here, inside this smile, in this place, she is enthralled.

She almost tells him, without words, when it is three in the morning and they are both exhausted and his maroon turtleneck is rumpled rather than immaculate. She isn't quite ready to, but his drooping eyes still crinkle with kindness when he looks at her, and she doesn't want to pull away. With the raw prowess of a tiger she mars her lips along his jaw in a way that might be rough if it wasn't softened by her smile. 

He recounts for her two years later, with and without words, how she shed her bird body, kept her heart, became a tigress, and captured his.


	2. Chapter 2

He is eleven when he starts collecting smiles. They intrigue him, these small, stitched little kisses that stretch and ignite like a candle, turning faces from empty houses into well lit, beautiful cathedrals, full of music and joy. Most actions, being somewhat elusive to science, flood his small canvas body with wonder, but he tucks smiles away in a special corner of his brain, and pulls them out when no amount of turtlenecks can keep him warm or freeze his thoughts. 

He has a trillion smiles from Riley Mathews. Her smiles are all inclusive; everyone is a VIP. They say, "You matter" and "Hello!" and for a while he thinks he needs those the most. But they pile up like pennies. Each is shiny, sure, and lovely. But they are also perfect circles, a-okay, everyday smiles. They are common. They are not what he craves. 

He is eleven and three quarters when he vows to sow a genuine smile upon the soul of one Maya Hart. She's not so broken as they say, animal bones that have been whittled into a delicate flute, but with a vibrant sound. It lingers in the corner of her eyes. He wants to color her with enough warmth to hear her flute song fully from her lips, and finally capture one of her elusive smiles. 

He is sixteen when she plants a smile on his jaw, raw and quick as lightning, before his brain has time to sit up and really register it. It's three twenty two in the morning, and a plump art portfolio is perched on a stack of ruffled, despised, but finally finished trig. There are purple crescent half moons smudged under her azure eyes and wild, white water rapid currents in the bend of her belligerent blonde hair, and he's never seen her more disheveled, natural and exposed, but it's the remainder of that smile clinging to her lips that makes her the most beautiful thing he's ever beheld. 

It is her birthday, and they are eighteen when she completely flummoxes him all over again, upsetting all of his strategic plans. That's one of the things he loves about her, the way she lives so spontaneously. It's enticing, as hypnotizing as a kite dancing in the wind. He's always been there to hold the string, and she is always there when he works himself into a rut, and this is the first time she lets him fly with her. 

They are eighteen when she first captures one of his quirky smiles with her own.


End file.
